Not all company directors have copped a hard time from shareholders about the share portion of their remuneration this year. At
Whitehaven Coal
’s annual general meeting in Sydney in early November, there were no questions from the floor about the tidy profits chief executive
Tony Haggarty
and executive director
Andy Plummer
made on some canny share trading earlier in the year.

On February 25, Haggarty raised $23.3 million selling 5 million Whitehaven shares at $4.66 each to institutions. He then took up options on about 7.3 million shares at $1 each on March 3. Those shares are now worth up to $6.89 each, meaning Haggarty is up almost $44 million on paper. Plummer also exercised options on 7.3 million shares for $1 each in late January. He sold 3.7 million of those shares – or about 10 per cent of his overall shareholding – on February 25 for $4.66 per share, making a $13.5 million profit.

“We didn’t get one question about it at our recent annual general meeting," Haggarty tells The Australian Financial Review.

“It was really just to take care of some personal cash needs and it probably looks like we sold out at a cheap price now, doesn’t it?" Haggarty says he and Plummer sank $30 million of their own money each in Whitehaven since joining the company’s board in May 2007. Their shareholdings in the company are now worth about $240 million each.

Given that Whitehaven shares have almost doubled in value since the beginning of 2010, Haggarty says he hasn’t had any complaints from investors about his share trading.

“[The institutions] understood what we were doing. After all, they are rebalancing their portfolios on a daily basis. They knew it was a pretty small proportion of our overall shareholding so they knew not to read much into it, really."

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There are plenty of other executives who have made good money through canny share trades in the past year.
Seek
joint CEO
Paul Bassat
made $3.2 million on the exercising of options and subsequent sale of those shares last November.
CSG
managing director
Denis Mackenzie
is up about $1.3 million on the shares he subscribed for in a share placement in late January. Bonus shares, while not common at Australian Stock Exchange-listed companies, have also been an extremely lucrative way of adding to their paper wealth for several executives.
Aquila Resources
co-founder and CEO
Tony Poli
received about 7.5 million Aquila shares in December 23 last year. At the time the shares were worth about $74 million, though it’s now down to about $10 million. Even so, the shares Poli received were in effect free, given the company gave each shareholder one bonus share for every 10 they already owned. It has been a common event at Aquila. Every year in the past six, Aquila has undertaken a bonus issue, including a 1-for-1 issue in 2006 that instantly doubled the paper wealth of every Aquila shareholder, including its directors. Poli’s stake in Aquila is now worth about $715 million, of which about $505 million is from bonus shares he’s received every year since 2004.

Executives from Philippines gold play
Medusa Mining
also did well from a bonus share issue in March. Each Medusa shareholder received one share for every 10 they owned, including managing director
Geoff Davis
. He received 550,250 shares worth almost $2.1 million on March 31. Medusa shares kept rising and Davis sold 1 million of his Medusa shares on June 1, making $4.5 million. Those who kept their Medusa shares, received free in the March bonus issue, are ahead 47 per cent on paper.

Several directors of coal technology outfit
White Energy Company
have also done well this year. Chairman
Travers Duncan
and CEO
Brian Flannery
are about $45 million up on $25 million of shares they each subscribed for in August, while director
Hans Mende
made a $12 million profit in late October when he took up subscription rights for $19.3 million of shares. Another director,
John Kinghorn
(the founder of Rams Home Loans), is sitting on a paper profit of about $15 million on the White Energy shares for which he subscribed in August, while fellow board members
John McGuigan
and
John Atkinson
converted performance shares at about one-third below market value at the same time Mende did.

White Energy is one of several emerging mining companies where executives have made plenty of money on share trades.

Regis Resources
chairman
Nick Giorgetta
, managing director
Mark Clark
and executive director
Morgan Hart
are collectively more than $20 million ahead on the shares they received just before last Christmas in a share placement offered at a 19 per cent discount to the company’s share price at the time. Giorgetta, who has a shareholding worth about $35 million, is up another $1.6 million on additional shares he purchased on the market in July. Clark points out that, with Hart and Giorgetta, he participated in the raising with full approval from Regis shareholders.

“We raised $50 million in equity to deliver a gold project and we did that. So while all gold stocks are up, we have also delivered a fair bit of value for our shareholders as well. And we [the directors] also bought shares on the market before the raising as well."

Directors in
Matrix Composites & Engineering
have also enjoyed a good run since the company listed last November.

Matrix shares are up fivefold since then and chairman
Maxwell Begley
took advantage of the rising share price to make an $11 million profit when he sold some of his shares in August. His son and managing director
Aaron Begley
made a $2 million profit on another sale at the same time, and is also up almost $4.5 million on the value of the options he exercised on October 1.

In October last year,
Coalspur Mines
executive director
Taso Arima
was able to convert 4.8 million shares at no cost when the company announced a coal resource of 128.1 million tonnes had been defined at Coalspur’s Hinton West project in Canada. Under the terms of Arima’s contract he was to receive the shares if Coalspur announced a coal resource exceeding 40 million tonnes. The value of the performance shares he received is now about $6 million.

Not all directors have enjoyed profits, however.
TPG Telecom
chairman and CEO
David Teoh
is down about $2 million on the shares he bought on the market in his company in June.
Primary Health Care
boss
Ed Bateman
has lost 10 per cent on the value of the shares he received as part of his company’s dividend reinvestment plan in October. And
James Packer
is down about $15 million on the
Crown
shares he purchased on the market on October 9. Packer is about the same figure up on the shares he bought in
Consolidated Media Holdings
in June last year, when he increased his stake to ward off Kerry Stokes.